On the Butcher Block: A Panorama of Social Marking

I.

The Butcher Boy, a 1998 production of the currently daring and inventive Irish film industry, directed by Neil Jordan, provides a fortuitous occasion for setting out certain of the textual, sociological, and theoretical parameters that need to be taken into account in contemporary cultural criticism. Based on a 1992 novel by Patrick McCabe,¹ the film graphically raises questions of social branding, progressive alienation, exclusion, outsideness, community, social oversight and sanction, and the interplay between public and private discourses pivotal at once to narrative, semiotics, critical theory, and the "human science" known as sociology.

The poignancy of the story of a charming and fundamentally sound boy who is, through ostracism, méconnaissance, and the misapplication of social resources, transformed first into a pariah and then into a homicidal deviant is relevant to our understandings of several interrelated phenomena: of how narratives (especially ones with characters) and indeed all texts function; of the social sciences as the epistemological and discursive arbiters of human behavior and institutions; and of the kind of ethics we can begin to imagine for a multicultural, essentially interactive, and philosophically explicit contemporary world. It is crucial for us to understand from the outset that textual complexity and indeterminacy—which have, throughout the twentieth century, initiated fundamental revisions within the field of knowledge and its configuration and in the practices of the learned discourses—could go hand in hand with conceptions of society, community, and ethics. The breathless apprehension of the priority of language to reality, knowledge, and even personal experience itself with which the twentieth century began took the entire century for the contracts of art and the discourses of culture to integrate, and shows no sign of waning. Yet, just as discord and ambivalence are "hard-wired" into the ideologies and institutions of society, an audience—a protocommunity—is implicit in the linguistic artifacts that allegorize their own arbitrariness, contrivance, and confusion. The Butcher Boy, both the film and text, is a double artifact situated on the dynamic border, or borderline, between a critical theory pursuing the impact of linguistic processes and phenomena upon the artifacts and media of ideological reassurance, and a social theory extrapolating designs for modes of social interaction and institutionality in a rapidly changing world. In full appreciation for the inventive demonstrations by modernist and postmodern authors from Kafka, Joyce, and Stein to Borges and Calvino of language's intractable stance toward easy moral and institutional payoffs, I hold nonetheless to a fundamental complementarity between the linguistic and sociological components of a viable theory of culture.

The present essay sets out on the trajectory of a parcours, a generative return to the operational language of sociology from the perspective of the Philosophy of Writing, a term I broached in the theoretical sections of my last book.² The concern that draws me in this direction is the current dissonance between the subtlety of contemporary critical theory and the sluggishness on the part of social institutions in advanced technological and capitalist societies in responding to the divergences and proliferation of alternatives that the theory has underscored. Already embedded in the discourse of critical theory are models of difference, alterity, and ethics of potentially enormous consequence to the reformulation of social responsibility and justice in contemporary societies in which the nature of socioeconomic relations, including the very concept of work, have undergone rapid and steady change. The rhetoric of marginality, by the same token, has much to engender in the emergence of a countereconomy that might well counter, were its terms and tropes to achieve explicitness, the increasingly stark rift between economic citizenship and statelessness in heavily technological economies.

The quandary here is not so much the remoteness of highly speculative theoretical allegories to "real world" problems as the relative dearth of articulations bridging the two discursive registers: the relative overlooking of what Kant situated in the...