The Governed and Their Governors
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The situation of the Guayaki chief was exactly opposite. He did not have to dictate to the community, only to recall an immemorial law that was inseparable from the founding myth that gave the group its iden tity. He was the spokesman of this law, in the strictest sense of the term. “From the mouth of the leader,” as Clastres himself puts it, “spring not only the words that sanction the relationship of command-obedience, but also the discourse of society about itself, a discourse through which it proclaims itself an undivided community and proclaims its determi nation to continue in this undivided condition.”40 If t here was neither a properly political sphere nor a state, this was b ecause society excluded conflict and division from its midst. It could conceive of itself only as homogeneous. If disagreement emerged among the Guayaki, it was dealt with at once by expulsion. The law of the gods and ancestors was a law of obligatory unanimity. The leader could not issue commands that w ere the result of any personal decision; the words he spoke were sacrosanct, for “the leader, when he speaks, never expresses a personal whim or as serts a personal law, but only articulates a soc iological desire, that the society remain undivided, and pronounces the words of a law that no one has laid down, for it is not a product of human decision.”41 The Guayaki thus escaped domination by a leader only at the cost of blind submission to a law about which they had no say. Their emanci pation from h uman pol itical power was purchased at the price of abso lute conformity to divine and ancestral tradition. This dependence was literally engraved, moreover, on the bodies of youths submitted to un imaginably cruel initiation rituals. “Society inscribes the words of the law on their bodies for all to see,” Clastres notes. “For the law is the foundation of the social life of the tribe, something no one is meant to forget.”42 By means of t hese rituals the permanence of the law was established, and the equal dependence of all persons on it. Rule was totally internalized, and hidden beneath the outward appearance of a society having no government. Human liberty was therefore nothing more than a purely intellectual apprehension of necessity, the w ill having been identified with unfailing obedience to the commandments of nature and the gods. Proudhon on the one hand, the Guayaki on the other—two utterly opposed ways of rejecting the idea of government by embracing the law, in the one case through its ceaseless propagation by means of contractual
