empty signifiers

It is a short psychological step, however, between what seems like the pleasure of joint identification--the thrill of rebelling against one's derided secondary status by creating an underground where, by virtue of being secondary, a culture has in fact become dominant--and the creation of a gestalt where the members of the oppressor primary culture are investments of the other.

The other as used here is a psychological term to describe the basic taxonomy of human experience. Following Jacques Lacan's discussion of the mirror stage of human development, the assumption of language by a speaking individual requires a recognition of the boundaries of the self and everything else. Prior to the infant's ability to grasp language, there is no division, there is no separation between itself and the environment. As the infant begins to understand that its reflection in the mirror is both self and not-self, it formulates a theory of the world that underpins the entirety of human consciousness. That theory is the basic expression of the dichotomy between Self and Other.

Self is what we know, what we recognize as identical or similar to ourselves. At its most basic level the Self is that ephemeral presence we name I. As socialized persons, however, we extend the category of Self to include those who possess the same cultural competencies--and thus are more likely to experience the world in a similar fashion--as ourselves. Thus our family, village, clan, ethnic group, or nationality becomes an extension of the Self.

The insularity first encouraged by apocalypticism can be seen as a celebration of the Self in an atmosphere of repression. The secondary culture is on the verge of being swallowed, of being resocialized, by the dominant oppressor. Because the oppressed is not allowed to express the characteristics that have until now defined him as Self, he seeks another outlet to do so. Thus the secondary culture becomes more strongly bonded by virtue of their threatened extinction or assimilation at the hands of the primary culture. This is the foundation of the drive for insularity, of identifying most strongly with those already recognized as Self.

It is only in societies where the minority position is protected that the resocialization process can be perceived as nonthreatening. If there is no danger to the secondary culture's identity--that is, if there is no process of conversion to the mores of the primary culture--then the insularity can lead to something of a peaceful coexistence. The emergence of ethnic neighborhoods during the great immigrations into the United States in the mid-1800s and early 1900s are somewhat representative of this phenomenon. There were conclaves of Irish, Polish, Catholic, Romanian, Chinese, Japanese, and various other ethnicities that functioned both in the primary British colonial-informed culture as well as maintaining an insular identity among similar immigrants: the neighborhood itself, having chosen to exist as a unified entity of one particular group, can be seen as an insular secondary culture.

It was never likely that this type of coexistence would ever occur prior to the development of legal protection and recognition of the secondary against the primary. (The Constitution's protection of minorities against the "tyranny of the majority" is what makes this possible in United States society.) The imperialism of Rome, Babylon, Assyria, and the other great empires of the early world was not a matter of coexistence, but geared more toward assimilation in the name of ensuring loyalty. While there are exceptions to every pronouncement, the requirements for secondary cultures to perform in the identifications of the primary, at the expense of their own identifications, is strong evidence for this conjecture. That is, while the Jewish population existed as both subjects of the Roman empire and as Jews, there were legal, social, and religious ordinances in place that prioritized loyalty to Rome over Jewishness. The worship performance at checkpoints in Meiji-era Japan to screen for covert Christians is another example of the dominance of the primary.

One of the strongest reasons for assimilating--for denying one's prior identity and resocializing as a member of the oppressive primary culture--is survival. It was the case with Roman and Babylonian empires that the punishment for indulging in dual identifications, for sustaining ties to the secondary culture, was torture, imprisonment, or death. It would seem this would automatically generate the conditions necessary to begin to conceive of the dominant culture as the Other.

This is not the case. Loyalty to the dominant culture will never last long if it is only legislated, and the enmity produced by tormenting people will eventually overpower the ruler's grasp. The emperors were shrewd leaders, and had an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of power. (They may not have dressed it in psychological terms, but they understood what they were doing.) The only way to convince people to embrace their servitude, to celebrate the nature of their oppression, is to convince them that their identification in the secondary culture is wrong.

It is a masterstroke. To convince someone that their servitude is not a thing to rebel against, you must force them to accept not only the dominance of the primary culture, but its justness, its righteousness. And the easiest way of doing so is to subvert their secondary identities as being the Other. In the American South, prior to the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, this is clearly evident in the construction of white/black.

Specifically, in the texts and accounts we have of that time, there is a very active construction of blackness, as inferior, as mentally weak, as bestial. But there is never any real question of the construction of whiteness--whiteness is at most the background against which blackness becomes apparently wrong. The terms used to describe ethnicity and racial division bear this out. Slaves were colored, and their Caucasian oppressors were white. The implicit suggestion is that coloredness exists as an aberrance, whereas whiteness is the proper state of being. White folk were not white folk, they were folk.

So at last we have a reasonable answer to the question of the investment of Otherness. The primary culture in a strongly imperialistic society becomes a receptacle for the oppressed culture's notion of the Other as a kind of reflexive act of survival. Faced with the prospect that their cultural heritage--their preexisting socialization--will become unfamiliar, the secondary culture both closes ranks and begins to reaffirm its own self-identification by reversing the terms of the activity. The dominant people seek to define their slaves as Other; in response, the slaves ever more strongly identify with each other as Self, and begin to recast the dominators as Other.

Is apocalypticism a necessary condition for this maneuver? No. But is this maneuver in secondary cultures a byproduct of the emergence of apocalyptic traditions? Yes. The cultural competencies that allow for members of the secondary to identify each other also serve to strongly define those who do not possess those competencies as outsiders. And with apocalyptic literature's strong emphasis on the coming social change as the end result of revelation or catastrophe, it is easier still to allow oneself to refuse to identify with the members of the primary at all.

The next piece of this essay will begin to examine the specifics of American Christian evangelical apocalypticism and its ramifications for a democratic society.