Alex Komoroske wrote that high-trust societies are more innovative and dynamic, and that trust means believing your collaborator won’t screw you. “When everyone believes, magic is real.” It got me thinking about what Giorgio Agamben says the curse does inside the oath in his book The Sacrament of Language. For Agamben, magic begins with the broken oath. (§18, p. 43)
It is from the oath—or, better, from perjury—that magic and spells are born…
We often talk about magic and faith as opposites, if we dare to at all, yet both sound like belief in unseen powers. Judging by social media, it’s easier to entertain talk of UFOs or conspiracy theories than to say we have faith.
What gets me about reading Agamben’s book is how ordinary this kind of faith is. When I give you my word, you can make plans on the strength of it because you can hold me to what I said. That is the sacrament of language. Ordinary speech is based on oaths. We coordinate this way every day.
Large language models make the oath visible again. A model can produce the words of a promise, but it has no life in the world to stake on keeping it. Someone still has to answer for what gets done.
A few more notes on oaths, magic, and faith from Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language (translated by Adam Kotsko, Stanford University Press 2011).
Blessing and curse belong to the same oath. The curse holds the speaker to the word they broke. Magic grows out of that breach when the divine name comes loose from the oath and becomes a spell. The divine name is what you swear by. You call on something you hold sacred to witness your promise. (§15, pp. 36–37)
The name of the god, which signifies and guarantees the juncture between words and things, is transformed into a curse if this relation is broken. What is essential, in every case, is the co-originarity of blessing and curse, which are constitutively copresent in the oath.
Keeping faith when it costs you. In Cicero’s account, the Carthaginians let the Roman commander Regulus go to Rome on his promise to return. He kept his word, even though he expected them to kill him. (§11, p. 23)
Faithfulness is thus essentially the correspondence between language and actions.
Trust can put you at someone’s mercy. A defeated city takes the victor at their word and depends on them to make it good. (§12, p. 27)
… one abandons oneself completely to the “trust” of someone else and obtains, in exchange, that one’s protection.
What an oath does. If I swear I’ll come back, you can take me at my word and make plans before I’ve even left. If I don’t come back, I’m sure you’ll curse me. (§23, p. 55)
The performative is a linguistic enunciation that does not describe a state of affairs but immediately produces a fact, actualizes its meaning.
An oath has authority because we trust someone to answer for their words in the world we share. We give our word so we can act together. We act together because we’re trying to get somewhere. As Polanyi says in The Tacit Dimension (p. 82), a scientific tradition can teach us where to look for things we can’t yet explain. It’s an oath to discover what else we can find by coordinating together. In Agamben’s terms, the scientific tradition is always an oath oriented toward a blessing. Our words can bring us into contact with a reality that has more to it than we’ve managed to say.
Scientific tradition derives its capacity for self-renewal from its belief in the presence of a hidden reality.