Mistakenness

A mistaken use of a sign opens a kind of rupture on the scene that must be recuperated somehow. Mistakennes threatens the breakdown of Linguistic Presence.

Mistakenness is specifically human and emerges on the Originary Scene. If we assume that one member of the group must have aborted his gesture first, then it follows that that individual could not really have known what he was doing. This makes sense if we speak, not of an aborted gesture (Eric Gans has himself spoken of the ambiguity of the phrasing here) but as what it actually is, an aborted act of appropriation. It only becomes a gesture with its imitation by the rest of the group. In this case, no member fully intends the meaning of the sign. There would be an emergent realization of what they have all done in the also emergent contrast between the grasping and the withholding that each can see in all the others.

Originary Mistakenness is a new way of speaking about mimetic rivalry and crisis and the resources available for deferral. The one who makes a spelling, pronunciation, or grammatical mistake, or commits some solecism (or, for that matter, “misreads” a situation, “misunderstands” a text, “misses” a “hint,” and so on), is as “blameless” as the one who accidentally disrupts some ritual space; and the mistake evokes a very similar sense of unease and fragility—everyone around feels compelled to show that they would never make such a mistake, first of all by demonstrating some recognition of its mistakenness. I suggest that this is because the error, whether grammatical or in any other unsatisfied convention, is a sign of infinite desire: making a mistake exposes one as imitating what one doesn’t know how to imitate, and therefore what one doesn’t understand, and the only reason for doing so is an “empty” and insatiable desire to be included in the very community one has just demonstrated oneself unsuitable to join.

References:

Originary Mistakenness, Defilement, and Modernity by Adam Katz: https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1601/1601katz/