The inverse performative: ordeal and active democracy
Marco Mazzeo
Università della Calabria,
Dipartimento di scienze umane
Via P. Bucci, Arcavacata di Rende (CS)
Italy
[email protected]
Abstract: There is a poor relative of judgement that situates itself at the crossroads of different
rhetorical actions – between deciding and conciliating, between judgment and celebration. The ordeal
(from the Anglo Saxon «or-dal», «supreme judgement») is a trial that establishes whether someone is
telling the truth; we find it in ancient Greece as well as in contemporary populations in Central Africa.
Since it stands halfway between language and act, between the faculty of language and praxis, the
ordeal articulates a rhetorical path which is often ignored. While for human animals omens, oracles
and oaths function as stabilizers of the future, the ordeal takes on the role of stabilizer of the past. It is
an inverse performative act in which it is not words that are made action but, rather, it is actions that
are made word.
Keywords: anthropogenesis, democracy, oath, ordeal, performative
Introduction
For the sake of brevity and clarity, I will structure my paper following three
main theses. I will devote a section to each of them, but it will be necessary to
anticipate their content from the beginning:
1) Linguistic thesis: the ordeal is the genus; the oath is the species. Ordeal and
oath go along opposite directions. The oath is language entering praxis: it
stabilizes the time and the relations between human beings, it soothes the
unpredictability of human praxis through utterance (“I swear I will not kill you
now”, “I swear I will not kill you”, “I swear I did not kill your father”). Vice
versa, the ordeal is praxis entering language: it is a formalized trial (walking on
burning coals, diving in boiling hot water, take poison) that can determine
whether one is telling the truth.
2) Anthropological thesis: the ordeal is not a mere superstitious practice
belonging to a past to be forgotten, but it is part of an anthropogenic machine
always at work. It allows the suspension of the natural state of all against all. It
represents the dawning moment of what we might call a “procedure”, an
impersonal device transforming the activity of veridiction into an activity of
assertion. Far from being, as Louis Jean Koenigswarter (Études historiques sur le
dévéloppement de la société humaine, 1850, p. 5) argues, “une des phases
nécessaires de transformation, par lesquelles l’homme doit passer pour s’élever
de son état primitif”, the ordeal is the focal point through which it is possible to
re-discover a crucial dimension of human praxis that, as such, is a very up-todate one.
3) Political thesis: the oath is related, among other things, also to the foundation
of representative democracy (I swear I will comply with my mandate or with the
Constitution on which my mandate is based); the ordeal is the ritual precursor of
active democracy. Rediscovering the ordeal today means to work on the
anthropological sense – as well as to the political opportunity – of democratic
forms founded on the draw.
1. Ordeal and oath: from genus to species
Oracles et ordalies sont
de tous les temps et de tous les pays
(Anne Retel-Laurentin,
Oracles et ordalies chez les Nzakara,
1969, p. 13)
In his recent The Sacrament of Language, Agamben has proposed a
provocative thesis. According to the Italian philosopher, in language the distinction
between sense and denotation is not an eternal characteristic of human life, but it is
on the contrary a “historical product” (Giorgio Agamben, Il sacramento del
linguaggio. Archeologia del giuramento, 2008, p. 55). In other words: activities of
veridiction (the oath, first of all) in which the subject takes a challenge since he or
she is performatively bound to the truth of his or her utterance, historically precede
denotative activities in which the truth of what is being said is independent from the
subject uttering it (as in: “my pen is red” or “the cat is on the table”, etc.) (ivi, p. 58).
To this purpose, Agamben proposes to trace the origins of the oath in a linguistic
practice at the basis of the distinction between rite and law, religion and
jurisprudence. In this light, it is not the magico-religious powers that can explain oath
taking in the human world, but it is the very experience of the oath – the word made
action – that constitutes the foundation of those powers. But let’s move one step back
to clarify this point. The oath is part of a class of enunciations that Austin and
Benveniste call “performative” or “executive”: statements whose validity is produced
by the very act of utterance. “I take this woman to be my wife” is a performative
because it does not describe an act, but rather performs it in the very moment it is
accomplished; “I swear I will not kill my father” is a commitment I take on the
moment I utter the sentence. It is commonly said that in the case of performative
acts, and more so in oaths, saying is doing. For this reason, Agamben (ivi, p. 33)
claims that the oath “is a logos that is necessarily accomplished”. Agamben’s thesis
can be fully shared. However, it runs a risk of no secondary importance, namely, that
of crushing the aspect of human praxis (the action of humans that not only produces
something but also shapes one’s own identity) in favour of the verbal one. Yet,
human praxis is not merely constituted by words: this poses a danger of linguistic
idealism that is pernicious both from the philosophical and, as we shall see shortly (§
3), from the political point of view. Thus, we need to find a figure able to
counterbalance the absolute supremacy of the word made flesh (the oath) through a
procedure in which the flesh, to reread the biblical image in naturalistic terms, is
made word, in which doing becomes saying.
I thus propose the ordeal as a phenomenon capable of describing this
rhetorical-linguistic line. In fact the ordeal appears as an inverse performative: not
word made true because it is uttered, but act that, in its accomplishment, becomes
indisputable judgement.
Let’s start from the etymology of the word. The word «ordeal» derives from
the Longobard «ordail» and from the Saxon «ordâl» (German «ur-theil») meaning
«originary judgment», «supreme or divine judgment». Far from being variations on a
theme, the two readings of the etymology indicate opposite interpretations. If we
intend the ordeal as «divine judgement» (as is usually the case in the Middle Ages
and in the Christian tradition), the ordeal action is overwhelmed by the magico–
religious dimension. If we intend, as I suggest, the ordeal as «originary judgement»
we shift the axis of our discussion on the ways in which language and praxis
intertwine in human nature. In this sense, the ordeal is not the moment in which God
expresses himself, but a moment in which the activity of judgement is produced
among humans, when formalized procedures able to make words independent from
the person who utters them are generated. To better understand this point, let us take
a look at the definition of «ordeal » given by Gustave Glotz (L’ordalie dans la Grèce
primitive, 1904, p. 8): “Les ordalies sont des preuves magique et des sanctions
divines, dont l’effet est de mener le patient au triomphe ou à la mort”. In this
definition, what counts is not magic, or divine sanction, but the notion of «test, trial»,
as the illuminating example of ordeal in Sophocles’ Antigone shows. When the
sentries attending the surveillance of Polynices’ corpse are called to defend
themselves from the accusation of negligence, they argue that:
Nous étions prêts à prendre en main les fers rouges, à marcher à travers le feu et à jurer pardevant les dieux de n’avoir été ni coupable, ni complices.
(vv. 264-266; in ivi, p. 2)
The sentries are ready for the ordeal because they swear «they did not do it
[drasai to pragma]”. The point is interesting: not only does the ordeal accompany the
oath (its expulsion from the philosophical reflection is thus an anthropological
amputation) but it also precedes it in order and number. The oath is preceded by two
ordeals. The point of view here is the reverse of our contemporary perspective: it is
not the ordeal that represents an oddity in the presence of the oath, rather, it is the
oath that represents a form of ordeal. The ordeal is a trial intended to make a fact as
such, bringing a «pragma» into focus. As has been noted (Wolfang Wieland, Die
aristotelische Physik, 1974; Franco Lo Piparo, Aristotele e il linguaggio, 2003), the
Greek word does not refer to a simple fact, but a fact that, in order to be such, ought
to be brought into focus by words. The ordeal unveils a new aspect of the question:
humans can focus on a pragma through an access bound to praxis (the trial).
2. Ordeal and anthropogenesis: building grammatical statements
L’ordalie est un mode de preuve,
pas une sanction
(Sophie Lafont,
“L’ordalie en Mésopotamie”,
2008, p. 31)
The ordeal has a fundamental rhetorical task: stabilizing the past and
building a procedure that can stop a chain of revenge. However, in order to do so, it
turns to the future, namely to the outcome of a predetermined trial. The ordeal is thus
an ethical and political device rather than a cognitive one: it is an attempt to put on
hiatus the war of all against all. In order to determine who is right and who is not,
there is only a partial recourse to violence through a more or less total suspension of
the transition to the act: first you settle the formal conditions connected to a
prediction (“if you get burned by the burning coal, you are guilty) and then you wait
and see what happens. From this standpoint, not only is the ordeal not an irrational
practice, but it is also a fundamental rhetorical act through which you try to include
in the human world an autonomous standard of judgement “pour aboutir au bon
jugement” (Sylvain Soleil, “Les trois rationalités de l’ordalie”, 2008, p. 23). We
could as well state that through the ordeal it is possible to stabilize the structures of
consent, forms of pistis (in the Greek sense of the word), or what Ludwig
Wittgenstein (Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1953) calls “grammatische Sätze”. It
is for this reason that the ordeal, like the oath, is a universal phenomenon belonging
to all human communities: from ancient Greece (Gustave Glotz, L’ordalie dans la
Grèce primitive, 1904) to the traditional peoples in Central Africa (Mary Douglas,
The Lele of the Kasai, 1963; Anne Retel-Laurentin, Oracles et ordalies chez les
Nzakara, 1969), from India to Wales (Louis Jean Koenigswarter, Études historiques
sur le dévéloppement de la société humaine, 1850), from Mesopotamia to the cultural
world of the Bible (Sophie Lafont, “L’ordalie en Mésopotamie”, 2008). Firewalking,
throwing someone in the water, picking a straw from a heap – these are all more or
less brutal forms of “trial”. They do not express an universal human need related to
the supernatural world (Louis Jean Koenigswarter, Études historiques sur le
dévéloppement de la société humaine, 1850, p. 169), but rather the universal human
need to establish trials able to devise units of measurement, reference points for
making a judgement.
The relation between the oath and the ordeal is one of reversal. The oath
attempts at controlling the unpredictability of human behaviour through a
commitment often expressed in the future form (“I swear I will not kill you”) that is
inevitably exposed to the various occurrences of human life (I may swear I will not
kill and then kill you anyway). In the case of the ordeal, factors are in reverse order.
First you are exposed to chance and then you try to control it through an institution, a
judge (often a shaman). Prediction is not a tool to protect from, but rather to expose
oneself to contingency and paradoxically find the suspension from the war of all
against all. For this reason, it is difficult to manage the ordeal itself, and the outcome
is never given for granted: it is not possible to predict who will drown and who will
not, who will survive to the poison and who will refuse to take it. While the oath
organizes the event through words, constantly risking losing its organization
(perjury), the ordeal is an exposure to the contingency that moves from this lack and
then tries to structure it through praxes and institutions. What are the consequences
of such a difference? My hypothesis is that the ordeal represents an anthropogenic
device through which it is possible to set up grammatical statements, units of
measurement, reference points for future actions in a moment of crisis. However, one
clarification is needed: this state of crisis the ordeal refers to is not exceptional: on
the contrary, it can emerge in any moment and with any frequency: “If time and
opportunity permitted many Azande would wish to consult one or other of the
oracles about every step in their lives”, the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard (1937, p.
123) notes. The ordeal does not have neat thematic limits: it can involve murders and
infidelity, disputes over property as well as suspects of witchcraft. In a situation of
crisis, conflict or stalemate, the ordeal produces an action that is unpredictable and at
the same time exposed to a rational procedure, i.e. a calculation. The result of this
calculation produces judgments whose statute is comparable to that displayed by
sentences such as “a circle is round”, “two and two is four”; that is to say,
grammatical statements. In both cases, we are dealing with sentences that it would be
foolish to question; for this reason, they organise ordinary experience. The ordeal is
everything rational: it is the live site of production of the grammar of a new form of
life.
3. The ordeal and active democracy: the draw
L’ordalie est l’unique arme des faibles,
mais peut devenir celle des fortes
(Glotz, L’ordalie dans
la Grèce primitive, 1904, p. 6)
Before moving to the last step, a clarification is necessary. We have stated
that the relation between the oath and the ordeal is one of reversal. But what kind of
reversal? The opposition between the structure of the oath (from word to praxis) and
of the ordeal (from praxis to word) does not reveal a relation between opposite
entities – as in the pair white/black, light/heavy – but, rather, a relation of inclusion.
The oath is a form of ordeal, it is the species contained in the genus. As Lafont
(“L’ordalie en Mésopotamie”, 2008, p. 28): “le serment est bien une forme d’ordalie,
qui a pour particularité de différer l’intervention de la divinité en cas de parjure, alors
que l’ordalie impose une réponse immédiate”. While an oath cannot contain an
ordeal, an ordeal often contains an oath. For the Nzakara, the trial of the poison
chicks are subjected to contains in itself oath formulas (Anne Retel-Laurentin,
Oracles et ordalies chez les Nzakara, 1969, p. 78): more in general, “le serment était
un élément essentiel des ordalies africaines” (ivi, p. 80). More interesting, and more
significant to attest this relation of inclusion, is the fact that not only can the oath
constitute an ordeal, but it can also appear as its object of application. This is well
illustrated by a biblical passage (Numbers, 5, 16-27) in which we can find the
detailed description not of an ordeal, but of the ordeal procedure which must be
followed in case of doubts on conjugal fidelity. The passage deserves to be quoted
extensively:
The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the LORD. Then he shall take some
holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water.
After the priest has had the woman stand before the LORD, he shall loosen her hair and
place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he
himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. Then the priest shall put the woman
under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you
have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this
bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. But if you have gone astray while married
to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a
man other than your husband”— here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—
“may the LORD cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your
womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. May this water that brings a curse enter your
body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.” “‘Then the woman is to
say, “Amen. So be it.” “‘The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash
them off into the bitter water. He shall make the woman drink the bitter water that
brings a curse, and this water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering will enter
her. The priest is to take from her hands the grain offering for jealousy, wave it before
the LORD and bring it to the altar. The priest is then to take a handful of the grain
offering as a memorial offering and burn it on the altar; after that, he is to have the
woman drink the water. If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her
husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse
and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will
miscarry, and she will become a curse.
In this case the oath is what is imposed to the ordeal. This circumstance is
not as rare as can be presumed. In Mesopotamia the practice of “manger un serment”
is attested (Sophie Lafont, “L’ordalie en Mésopotamie”, 2008, p. 38): along with the
oath formulation, it was prescribed that venomous plants ought to be ingested; they
would kill only those who perjured. A similar case is also present in de Mirabilibus
Auscultationibus by (Pseudo?) Aristotle (Minor Works, pp. 260-261):
[in Sicily] There is an oath which is regarded as very sacred there; for a man writes
down the oath [ὅρκος] he takes on a small tablet and casts it into the water. If he
swears truly, the tablet floats. If he swears falsely, the tablet is said to grow heavy and
disappear, and the man is burned.
I will now venture a third theoretical step, the more experimental. I will try
to expostulate it with clarity and, at the same time, with all due caution. An analogy
will be helpful here: the oath is to the ordeal as, in contemporary political systems,
representative democracy is to active democracy. Representative democracy seems
to have some affinities with the oath; active democracy undoubtedly appropriates an
element of the ordeal. Let us briefly analyse an example that will highlight the
former connection. What is considered by many as the birthplace of contemporary
representative democracy is in fact an oath: le serment du jeu de paume (The TennisCourt Oath). In the words of its author, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Bevière (20 June 1789):
[…] Arrête que tous les membres de cette assemblée prêteront, à l’instant, serment
solennel de ne jamais se séparer, et de se rassembler partout où les circonstances
l’exigeront, jusqu’à ce que la Constitution du royaume soit établie et affermie sur des
fondements solides, et que ledit serment étant prêté, tous les membres et chacun d’eux
en particulier confirmeront, par leur signature, cette résolution inébranlable […].
Here the oath is the oath of allegiance to the purpose of writing a Charter,
and it will later become an oath of allegiance to its letter. Said it differently, I will
vote in your stead but I swear I will respect your will and/or your charter. In the
words of Lycurgus, “the power that holds together our democracy is the oath” (cit. in
Agamben, Il sacramento del linguaggio. Archeologia del giuramento, 2008, p. 2).
But what democracy does it lay the basis of? It is worth reflecting upon this issue.
Lycurgus does not certainly have active democracy in mind. The latter is grounded
on an anthropological foundation closer to the ordeal. Active democracy works with
a very important ingredient that is present in the ordeal but it is expunged from the
oath: this ingredient is the radical exposure to chance, to contingency. Such an
exposure is embodied in the practice of the draw. Aristotle is surprisingly clear on
this point: if the magistrates are chosen through the draw, this is democracy, if they
are elected, this is oligarchy (Polit., 1294b, 5-10). Sparta is oligarchic precisely
because it is based on elective offices (ivi, 32-33). The words of Lycurgus about the
priority of the oath are those of a Spartan: thus, following Aristotle, Agamben
grounds the priority of the oath on the philosophical political thought of an oligarch,
not of a democratic.
It would certainly be interesting, but impossible for me here, to trace the causes of a
process of repression that has transformed the draw into an oddity and election into
the norm (as a first attempt: Yves Sintomer, Le pouvoir au peuple. Jurys citoyens,
tirage au sort et démocratie participative, 2007). For the time being, however, I will
limit myself to re-stating my point. The transition from a more restricted
phenomenon (the oath) to a wider anthropological phenomenon (the ordeal) offers a
double benefit. In philosophical terms, it allows the individuation of a rhetoric in
which the praxis is made word, it allows the close observation of the formation of
specific (since each concerns a specific case) and at the same time grammatical (that
is, indisputable and shared by the speakers) statements. Thus, the ordeal puts into
question the relation between language and praxis. In political terms: the ordeal re-
instates the notion of «draw» removing it from the playful image of the dice of
Monopoly or even from the addiction of gamblers. Through the centrality of the
draw, the ordeal re-discusses the topical issue of the relation between delegation and
democracy. The ordeal brings back the «clergy» (it. clero; fr. clergé) to its original
meaning: not a powerful and elitist class sacred to God, but κληρος (a casting lots, a
drawing lots), namely: a common exposure to chance.
References
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