Whenever Two or More Are Gathered: Relationship as the Heart of Ethical Discourse

By Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite

Makes the case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics
 
This study of the critical role of ethics and moral responsibility in the field of public administration, Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite posit that administrative ethics, as presently conceived and practiced, is largely a failure, incapable of delivering on its original promise of effectively regulating official conduct in order to promote the public interest. They argue that administrative ethics is compromised at its very foundations by two core assumptions: that human beings act rationally and that language is capable of conveying clear, stable, and unambiguous principles of ethical conduct.
 
The result is the illusion that values, principles, and rules of ethical conduct can be specified in workably clear ways, in particular, through their formalization in official codes of ethics; that people are capable of comprehending and responding to them as they are intended; and that the rewards and punishments attached to them will be effective in structuring daily behavior.
 
In a series of essays that draw on both fiction and film, as well as the disciplines of pragmatism, organizational theory, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and economics, Harmon and McSwite make their case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics. “Exercising responsible ethical practice requires attaining a special kind of relationship with other people. Relationship is how the pure freedom that resides in the human psyche—for ethical choice, creativity, or original action of any type—can be brought into the structured world of human social relations without damaging or destroying it.” Furthermore, they make the case for dropping the term “ethics” in favor of the term “responsibility,” as “responsibility accentuates the social [relational] nature of moral action.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780817385361

Book preview

McSwite

Introduction

Michael M. Harmon

O. C. McSwite

Modernity, the era that produced and sustained the field of administrative ethics throughout the twentieth century, has now ended, supplanted by a radically new context for social life that is of crucial importance to the practice of democratic governance. The predictable—and, we suggest, the inevitable—failure of administrative ethics to deliver on its original promise of effectively regulating official conduct in order to promote the public interest constitutes merely a variation on the broader discordant theme concerning the bankruptcy of modernism itself. The bankruptcy of modernist administrative ethics, we suggest, is rooted in the problematic nature of its two core assumptions: first, that the human mind is (or can be) consciously or cognitively rational and, second, that language can carry stable, standard, and compelling meaning such that the idea of guiding principles for ethical conduct is rendered possible.

The rationality assumption has been challenged in several quarters, perhaps most notably by psychoanalysis and psychology, which have long resisted the idea that human beings are essentially rational. These disciplines regard human behavior as driven by powerful and universal unconscious, sometimes neurotic, motivations. Indeed, clinical studies report that rather than seeking happiness, perhaps even a majority of people in human families try to arrange unhappy, even painful, melodramatic narratives and then live these out.

The foundations of economics, the very bastion of rationalism during the modern era, have in recent years been undermined by the subfield of behavioral economics, which has challenged its mother discipline on the question of whether human beings can, in fact, know what will make them happy and therefore make decisions that will promote their happiness. Even mainstream economists now concede that models of rational economic decision making that expand the boundary of the analysis to include such factors as transaction costs and the like inevitably collapse into something akin to an ecological impact statement in which there is no end to the list of factors that need to be considered in deciding something. The central axiom of economics, in fact, is now characterized by one of its own leading practitioners as a religion, whose conceptual difficulties can be resolved only by pure faith (Nelson 2001).

Further trouble for rationalism has developed along other fronts, including contemporary research on the human brain. Brain research has shown, for example, that human decision making depends critically upon—indeed, it is well-nigh impossible without—the involvement of the affective, or nonrational, dimension of the brain (Damasio 1994). Relatedly, the individual's intention to act itself has been shown to occur after the act has already been initiated, suggesting that rationality is merely the rationalization of prior, unconsciously authorized actions (Nørretranders 1998).

In the field of molecular biology, DNA researchers now claim to have identified clear linkages between highly specific human behaviors and inherited genes, suggesting that the propensity for these behaviors is determined more by people's genetic inheritance than by their conscious choices. (This finding, in fact, has recently provided the basis for legal defenses seeking to absolve people charged with certain kinds of criminal acts.) Epigenetics researchers have concluded that particular patterns of cognitive functioning are actually programmed into individuals’ brains by the cultures in which they are raised, and that these patterns may be genetically passed on to future generations through processes that function outside the DNA chain itself (Richerson and Boyd 2005). Such research, among other things, calls into question the conventional notion of personal responsibility, which assumes that, as free agents, people make, and are thus properly held to account for, consciously deliberate choices.

Modernism's second core assumption, that language is capable of carrying stable meaning, has been subjected to sustained criticism for at least a century, although hints of that critique can be traced back to ancient times. Most recently, the so-called postmodernist critique of language has challenged the standard ethicist view that moral principles can provide unambiguous ethical guidance. The highly varied group of theorists engaged in the postmodernist critique has consistently pointed to the contingency and instability of meaning in language. While postmodernism has been widely reviled and scorned, there has, as yet, been no serious challenge to or refutation of its central theme—namely, that language can only present meaning contextually and thus contingently.

THE PRACTICAL FAILURE OF ADMINISTRATIVE ETHICS

These challenges to the two core assumptions of modernist administrative ethics bear directly on the reasons for its inevitable failure in practical application. Administrative ethics has created the illusion that values, principles, and rules of ethical conduct can be specified in workably clear ways, in particular, through their formalization in official codes of ethics. Because of their high level of generality, however, ethics codes provide little if any assistance to administrators in making decisions in particular action contexts, often serving instead as means for scapegoating individual subordinates and peers who are, at most, only partially responsible for the organization's inevitably shared failings.

The application of administrative ethics is, in principle, identical to standard managerial approaches to controlling people's behavior in organizations. Administrative ethics assumes, as organization and management theory has traditionally assumed, that meaningful requirements can be clearly specified, that people are capable of comprehending and responding to them as they are intended, and that the rewards and punishments attached to them will be effective in structuring daily behavior. in the case of public agencies, however, organizational mandates are elaborately codified in law, as are many of the structural and procedural details of their execution (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003). Public servants are thus already so constrained by legal, budgetary, and political factors, as well as by their professional identifications—as attorney, engineer, or scientist—that codes of administrative ethics are either redundant or in some instances even contradictory to them. Public servants, so it appears, therefore need few additional reminders about ethics. They are already so constrained that they cannot help but be reminded of them in the day-to-day performance of their jobs.

Perhaps, however, such controls themselves are the wrong way to approach the problem of creating right action. In performing little more than a ceremonial function, ethical codes serve mainly to sustain the rationalist illusion that managerial control is possible. In our view, administrative ethics cannot provide practical guidance with respect to the difficult ethical issues that public agencies and public servants actually face. These are issues produced by the contradictions inherent in rationalism itself. Problems of ethical behavior, we believe, need to be reframed from the standpoint of an intrinsic perspective, which is to say, a radically different ontology of the human subject from that presupposed by the rationalist tradition of mainstream administrative ethics.

RELATIONSHIP AS AN ALTERNATIVE FOUNDATION FOR ETHICAL DISCOURSE

This book's subtitle encapsulates our central claim that human relationship is the only truly valid basis for ethical action and is alluded to in the scriptural source of its primary title: Whenever Two or More Are Gathered (from Matthew 18:20). The plausibility of human relationship as providing such a basis also invites, however, a more contemporary grounding in an ontology of the human subject informed by psychoanalytic theory and a post-structuralist (anti-representational) conception of language. The implications of our critique for the role of the administrator as a facilitator of collaborative ethical action among citizens and other public officials, we believe, are profoundly important. We spell out those implications in a variety of ways in the book's chapters, often using both fiction and film, in addition to more formal argument and analysis, in order to animate our perspective.

Our intrinsic perspective on human ontology leads us to reframe the concerns of administrative ethics from the standpoint of several related theoretical perspectives. Among these are Pragmatism, especially the writings of Mary Parker Follett and the so-called Neo-Pragmatist revival led by philosophers and literary critics such as Richard Rorty, Louis Menand, and Stanley Fish; and psychoanalytic theory, in particular (in McSwite's later work) the writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Complementing these two main sources, and in some ways inseparable from them, are insights drawn from structural linguistics, the depth psychology of C. G. Jung, interpretive sociology (in particular, ethnomethodology and existential phenomenology), post-structuralist theory, cybernetics, family systems theory, and neurophysiology. Our overall position may be condensed into the following general propositions:

1. Conceived in either philosophical or applied terms, administrative ethics implicitly assumes a commonsense representational view of language (a kind of linguistic positivism), according to which words mirror the external world. This perspective produces the common misconception that words refer directly to objects. Language is thus seen as the instrument by which people comprehend the world and communicate about it to others. Under this conception of language, such meanings can in principle be both stable and uniform across contexts. From our alternative viewpoint, words and language more generally do not and cannot perform such a representational (mirroring) function. Because language is unavoidably self-referential, words can only refer to concepts or other words. The meaning of any single word derives from its position in a chain of other associated words. in the parlance of structural linguistics, there is no master signifier that can fix permanently and thus authoritatively a word's meaning; rather, the meaning of words, and thus of sentences and texts, is inherently unstable, context-dependent, and co-produced by speakers and hearers. That instability may be reduced to tolerable levels, though never eliminated entirely, only through people's ongoing, albeit often unconscious, collaborative efforts. Those efforts, however, will always be crucially influenced by the unique contingencies of context; their outcomes cannot be universalized in anything like the way traditional ethicists assume that principles function in human communication.

2. Attempts to control or influence people's behavior—whether through authoritative commands or ethical persuasion—will largely fail to achieve their purposes. That failure can be traced not only to the problematic view of language that such efforts take for granted, but also to the equally problematic ontology of the human subject that language-as-representation implicitly assumes. The human ontology (or in more conventional terms, the assumptions about the self or human nature) underlying administrative ethics depicts people as consciously rational, more or less fully aware of their wants, goals, and interests, and able as well to perceive the facts of the situations in which they must act. From the standpoint of language-as-representation, such individuals are, therefore, able to express unambiguously what they think, feel, see, and want, and can also comprehend and rationally respond to others’ similarly self-aware expressions.

3. The ontology of modernist rationalism, stated psychologically, is an ontology of the ego. In the Freudian image made popular in the United States, at least, the ego is described as the reality principle, that aspect of the personality through which the individual comes to terms with the environment and obtains what he or she needs or wants from it in order to survive. While there is no denying that what Freud called the ego is present in human psychological functioning, we believe that the depiction of it made popular by some of his followers greatly exaggerates its centrality and importance. Consequently, we see human ontology in a different light, one drawn in part from Carl Jung but chiefly from the more contemporary psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.

This is the bottom line of the ontology from which we work. We choose it because as far as we have been able to tell, there is no other ontology available (outside of various religious belief systems) that describes human beings as having the capacity for truly free thought, feeling, and action. Exercising it, though, requires attaining a special kind of relationship with other people. Relationship is how the pure freedom that resides in the human psyche—for ethical choice, creativity, or original action of any type—can be brought into the structured world of human social relations without damaging or destroying it. It is a fundamentally different kind of ontology, but one that is required if we are to get to a different kind of administrative ethic.

4. This ontology helps to explain our preference for the term responsibility over ethics. Owing to what H. Richard Niebuhr (1963) describes as its many hidden references, allusions, and similes, responsibility implies a more felicitous, subtle, and above all a more practical normative image for the public administrator than does ethics. In integrating the dual images of maker and answerer, responsibility s varied and often opposing connotations serve to highlight the paradoxes produced by the tensions between personal moral agency and the extrinsic institutional and political requirements that bear upon the administrator's conduct. Responsibility also invites a developmental conception of the human subject by focusing upon the unconscious aspects of action; owing to its liberal rationalist origins, ethics typically does not. Finally, and perhaps most basic to our own position, responsibility accentuates the social (relational) nature of moral action. According to such a connotation, responsibility bespeaks an ethos of responsiveness, or responseabilities, rather than compliant obedience. And responsibility's companion notion, accountability, implies a mutual, back-and-forth accounting of (rather than for) one another's actions, as opposed to subordinates’ being held to account by their hierarchical superiors. Following Niebuhr's insistence that responsible action is necessarily interaction, we thus depart from the traditional emphasis of administrative ethics on the individual administrator as wise decision maker (a Man of Reason), proposing instead a normative conception of the public administrator's role as a facilitator of collaborative action among people engaged in authentic relation with one another.

5. Our overall objective is to reframe and dissolve problems as traditionally posed by mainstream administrative ethics. Included among these is the pseudo-problem of ethical relativism (at least as the term is conventionally construed) and, in our view, the unsolvable problem of identifying trans-contextual, universal foundations of moral justification. In their stead we suggest an alternative pair of generic problems of administrative action implied by our critique—namely, moralism and rationalism. Our aim, however, is not to solve these problems theoretically, but to clarify the practical conditions needed for their amelioration on a case-by-case basis by public administrators and citizens.

THE REST OF THE BOOK

Although the possibly unfamiliar territory we traverse may strike some public administration scholars as an exotic diversion from their own practical concerns, we want to make clear that our concerns are no less practical—and no less ardently felt—than theirs. The field of administrative ethics extends a venerable tradition of academic public administration through its advocacy of administrative practices and programs grounded on scholarly theory and research. Administrative ethicists are typically conversant not only with the core literature of their parent discipline of public administration, but often also with various associated literatures that they regard as essential to ethical discourse, including moral philosophy, organizational theory, liberal democratic theory, public law, and neoclassical economics. This is also true of our approach to administrative ethics and related normative issues; we bring a variety of theoretical orientations to these as well. We differ, however, from more traditional work on these issues because our project involves reframing questions rather than answering them as they have been conventionally framed, dissolving rather than resolving what are essentially pseudo-problems, and exposing other conceptual dead ends. We identify ourselves nominally as theorists, but theorists who do not believe in purely theoretical solutions to practical problems. Although we write from the margins of the discipline and therefore approach administrative ethics from often oblique and even eccentric angles, our perspective, we believe, bears directly on the core practical limitations of administrative ethics as currently conceived and implemented in public agencies. Because our own scholarly identities, like those of most mainstream administrative ethicists, are rooted primarily in the discipline of public administration, we do not intend our critique as merely a provocative supplement to the mainstream literature on the subject, but as a direct challenge to it.

With the exception of the jointly written introduction and concluding chapter, the remaining eleven chapters were written separately by McSwite and Harmon over a span of more than twenty years. We know of no other books that make anything like, in either scope or content, the critique we undertake here. The academic subfield of administrative ethics is quite insular and has thus far been largely immune to criticism of both its theoretical assumptions and practical value. in our previously published books—including McSwite's Legitimacy in Public Administration: A Discourse Analysis (1997a) and Harmon's Responsibility as Paradox: A Critique of Rational Discourse on Government (1995)—we have in effect laid some of the groundwork for the point of view we develop in Whenever Two or More Are Gathered, although little in this new book could be construed as duplicating these earlier efforts.

Although we have not previously written as coauthors, our ongoing conversation of more than a quarter of a century accounts for many of the book's thematic similarities. Still, and naturally enough, readers might detect differences in intellectual and rhetorical style in the essays. Harmon tends to be more formally logical and to develop tightly constructed arguments, while McSwite seeks to engage the reader through rhetorical directness, the force of conceptual novelty, and illustrations from personal experience. There are also some obvious differences in substantive focus. Despite these differences, however, we believe that on the whole the chapters sufficiently complement one another (and, in fact, include a few compliments by the authors to one another) to form a coherent, critical alternative narrative to that of mainstream administrative ethics. As such, we hope that these chapters will provoke thinking about the vital concerns of administrative ethics in fundamentally new ways, ways that are more appropriate to the contexts of the twenty-first century.

In chapter 1, Human Relationship: The Heart of Ethical Discourse, McSwite provides a theoretical overview of the lines of critical discourse that the rest of the book presents. The core contradiction of modernism is the particular form of consciousness or mind that it has generated. The pathology of this consciousness is the central problematic in the development of administrative ethics. McSwite discusses modernist consciousness and the issue of agency that it creates. The chapter concludes with an insight and an intuition that form the core of the alternative perspective on administrative ethics that the following chapters offer.

In chapter 2, The Case for Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: Personal Development as Ethical Guidance for Managers, McSwite notes that the increasing influence of sociological interpretivism in the field of organizational theory poses the threat that the interpretivist idea of social constructionism will serve to produce and legitimate a new and even more mistaken version of ethical relativism. While the interpretivist perspective has been found to be attractive and useful, it has too often been misinterpreted from a rationalist bias. The result has been that constructionism has created an attitude of anything goes or by rational choice alone we can make the world any way we wish it to be. This interpretation contravenes the ontology implicit in conventional interpretivism—which is actually conservative and traditionalist—and threatens to undercut any possibility for finding a stable grounding for ethical action. This dilemma can be avoided, McSwite proposes, only by admitting the double-sided and therefore unstable nature of such ethical values as truth telling and honesty. A stable foundation for ethical action can be found in the permanent structure that sets the trajectory of human development. When people recognize and orient themselves toward this archetypal process, they will be able to recognize intuitively the right form of action called for in specific situations.

The Case for Lying, Cheating, and Stealing essay drew a good deal of attention when it was published, but it revealed that many people seriously misunderstood its message as being encapsulated in its title. (The good news in this was that such a misunderstanding was direct evidence that the problem to which the essay was pointing is a real one, and that there seems to be a growing disposition toward relativism in the field.) Other readers, those who did not see the essay in this light, either did not understand it at all (because they could not see what it was advocating) or simply discounted it as just another perhaps imaginative (A really clever title!) but impractical theoretical exercise. These reactions to the essay's initial publication have prompted us to include it in this volume in the expectation that changed social and intellectual currents might now enable a more accurate reading of it.

Another reason for its inclusion here is that it presents a theory of administrative ethics that is directly illustrated in the essay that follows it, The Notorious Case of the Nonsense Lecture (chapter 3). Written almost coterminously with the occurrence of the episode it recounts, the case documents how the vital issue of personal development (namely, of bringing the ego under the purview of the Self) does indeed possess an archetypal reality. When activated, such an archetypal process will intrude into the world that has been constructed and sustained by consciousness and have an impact on it. In this case, because it occurred (happily) in a context that allowed for a great deal of open discourse and reflection, the impact was positive on all fronts—to an extent that astonished even the author, Orion White (half of the writing duo that writes under the pseudonym O. C. McSwite), as he lived through the event. Indeed, the Nonsense Lecture case provides an almost uncannily apt illustration of precisely what the preceding Case for Lying, Cheating, and Stealing essay described theoretically.

In The Responsible Actor as ‘Tortured Soul’: The Case of Horatio Hornblower (chapter 4), Harmon traces the exploits of C. S. Forester's fictional naval hero in order to illustrate the tensions among three distinct connotations of responsibility—political, professional, and personal—found in the normative public administration literature. Using two episodes from one of the Hornblower novels, Harmon shows that each of the three connotations of responsibility implies a praiseworthy principle, but when taken to extremes each principle degenerates into its pathological underside (e.g., accountability becomes blind obedience; and self-reflexive personal responsibility degenerates into narcissism). In order to mitigate the effects of its own distinctive pathologies, each principle of responsibility therefore needs to be countervailed, or held in check, by the assertion of either of the other two principles. Unlike administrative ethics, which typically conceives of moral conduct as applying a mixture of impersonal legal and moral principles, responsibility's multiple and often opposing connotations invite analysis of the paradoxical interplay of unique contextual considerations, personal moral agency, and legal and organizational constraints.

Originally published more than twenty years ago, the Hornblower chapter, we believe, warrants rereading from the standpoint of this book's human relationship theme, which is clarified more fully in chapter 1. In retrospect, Hornblower's suffering seems to have been, paradoxically, both needless in the sense that his solitary role of ship's captain prevented him from engaging in discourse with others, but also necessary for his own development by virtue of enabling him to regain and recognize his sense of moral agency (a theme later developed by McSwite in The Good, the Bad, and the Neurotic).

Written from a pragmatist point of view, Harmon's In Praise of Harry Bosch: Saving Honest Sufferers from Administrative Ethics (chapter 5) demonstrates the futility of ethics for justifying administrators’ discretionary judgments. Expanding on Justice Holmes's maxim that the young men know the rules; the old men know the exceptions, Harmon argues that moral choices are difficult precisely because the uniqueness of the contexts in which they have to be made precludes their reduction to mere instances of a general class to which ethical principles and rules supposedly apply. The notion of rules for making exceptions to rules is thus a contradiction in terms, and neither utilitarian nor Kantian ethics can escape that contradiction. By revealing the infinite variety of social contexts and nuances of human suffering, fiction—including several excellent murder mysteries—vividly demonstrates this point by exposing the shallowness of abstract ethical categories. Rather than divided by such categories, great fictional detectives instead occupy the only moral category that matters—namely, that of honest sufferers.

The next two McSwite essays, Moralism as Threat to the Possibility of Civil Society and The Problem of Evil: What a Postmodern Analysis Reveals, elaborate two related themes and should thus be considered in conjunction with each other. At the level of practical prescription or outcome, the idea of civil society embodies the conception of administrative ethics implicit in virtually all of this book's essays. In a civil society citizens are connected to the social order through a mutual acceptance of one another, that is, out of the kind of regard for one another that is produced when conditions of universal equity are pervasive in a social order. Moralism, an attitude or posture that characterizes any set of beliefs claiming to be grounded on a final term such as evil, is therefore anathema to civil society. As the subsequent essay argues, the idea of evil is an attempt to solve by brute force the problem of the ultimate openness of language—by using the device of ostensive definition; that is, by simply pointing at something in order to condemn it. The result is that what produces those things that are defined as evil most frequently is the idea of evil itself.

Further, both essays suggest that the open-endedness of language, rather than needing to be feared, can instead work to place individuals in a most comfortable, pleasing relationship to others and themselves. This is the great power, as the essay on evil describes, of the Matrix movies. They depict in the end how it is that the one definite term that the movie uses, Smith,—which is the virus that infected the world of the matrix—is the ultimate threat to the world. Smith is a unit of meaning that is final and complete in itself. Talking to other people, relating to them in the genuine and accepting manner that is characteristic of civil society, not only produces good feelings about oneself and others and an appreciation of how much we need one another as well, it also configures concrete, practical ideas concerning what to do next in our collaborative effort to live together morally and ethically.

Chapters 8 and 9, both written by Harmon, challenge the standard ethicist assumption that moral principles can justify or provide helpful guidance for administrative and policy decisions. In "Five Good Reasons Not to Act on Principle (Or, Why You Probably Can't Act on Principle, Anyway)," he argues that principled justification: (1) ignores the aporetic, and hence the paradoxical, relation among opposing principles; (2) fails to consider the pathologies produced by the single-minded assertion of particular principles; (3) neglects the role of feeling both in generating the moral impulse itself and in mediating the use of reason in decision making; (4) overasserts the role of consciousness as a positive force in guiding personal conduct; and (5) presumes an inflated conception of individual moral will at the expense of social and relational factors.

In Why Principles Can't Justify: A Pragmatist Commentary on the Affirmative Action Debate, Harmon provides a sixth good reason not to act on principle. Here he expands on Stanley Fish's position that the trouble with principles is that they cannot be substantively neutral or disinterestedly applied because they inevitably originate in, and are subsequently interpreted in light of, particular historical contexts and controversies. Purportedly universal principles are therefore infinitely flexible in their interpretation and always serve some people's interests to the exclusion of others’ interests. Using the contemporary debate over affirmative action as an illustration, he shows how principled argument necessarily fails on logical grounds to resolve that debate as a policy question, and diverts attention from the practical administrative task of making context-specific decisions about the workability of particular affirmative action programs.

Upon rereading from the standpoint of this book's primary theme, each of these two essays implicitly underscores in different ways the point that only the give-and-take of human relationship can enable citizens and public servants to cope morally and ethically with the highly particularized contexts in which they must act. Because language is radically indeterminate, that is, meaning has to be continually and provisionally negotiated in order to be contextually relevant, rather than settled permanently and definitively by appeal to the false promise of philosophical universals.

In The Good, the Bad, and the Neurotic: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Impossibility of Administrative Ethics, McSwite employs the psychoanalytic writings of the French theorist Jacques Lacan to elaborate a crucially important connection between administrative ethics and human agency. The core idea developed in the essay is that human agency and its corollaries, moral and ethical responsibility, are built-in qualities of the existential position of all nonpsychotic human beings. Hence, ethical theories that take inadequate account of that existential position thereby encourage people to forfeit their personal responsibility for their actions by seeking justification in linguistic abstractions. Justification of this sort presupposes a logical impossibility and is itself, therefore, both immoral and unethical. As the essay describes, the genesis of this problem is that in order to gain access to our conscious minds, we as human beings must enter the regime of language. This is an inescapable choice, like the one offered by the robber: Your money or your life! At the same time, submitting to language subordinates us to the symbolic world of law and culture, which seeks to dictate our behavior. McSwite uses an analysis of the film Memento to illustrate how we are all responsible for our genesis choice, that is, the choice that moves us into the world of consciousness. We must assume the suffering that making this choice entails, a suffering exemplified so well—as one of the Harmon essays documents—by Horatio