Bye Bye I Love You has organized my life for the last five years. I’ve been explaining that it was the predicate for my life. It structured other decisions. After my family, it was my priority. If something didn’t serve the book, it was jettisoned.
So maybe I should explain what I mean by “the predicate.” Which is also a pleasure to say.
In its broadest sense, the predicate is the reason for something’s existence. It’s the basic assumption or assertion that motivates the existence of something. A rock on the ground has no predicate. Seized in the hand, about to be thrown, the rock has a predicate: it will fly, fall, damage, smash. A hammer has a clear predicate: it’s a tool.
We’ll set aside the philosophical discussion about whether or not existence in itself amounts to a predicate. Some other time perhaps.
This concept appeared to me a couple of months ago, when I glimpsed the work of an artist who said her subject is animals and violence: a snake slipping into a soda can, a bug alighted on a crumpled piece of paper. I asked myself, how does this differ from the recent art by a friend of mine, whose work also includes a lot of animals? The words came to me immediately from somewhere: it has a predicate. It has a posture, takes an angle. My friend’s work had lost its identifiable predicate. (A story for another time.)
The mystery is why “predicate” floated into my head. What’s the predicate of predicate? But I’m going to explain it via two relevant sources, in a way that will make the word's meaning clearer.
The most important source is logic, where the predicate is the founding assertion on which another assertion is based. It also has a use in intelligence analysis, where it refers to the assumptions that give meaning to a fact. The predicate elevates information into intelligence.
A more obscure source is grammar, where the predicate is the part of the sentence that includes the verb and everything that is influenced by the verb, including the subject of the sentence. The predicate makes the sentence. In fact, some predicates are so powerful they allow you to infer a grammatical subject that isn’t there.
Once I began looking for the predicate, in my work and in others, I realized a couple of things.
One, it’s good for analyzing creative projects. The predicate stands as the kernel statement of the whole thing. Even the existence of a predicate is important to identify. Is it simple or complex? Are you playing predicates off each other? I realized that perhaps, in my own projects, I fuzz and blur the predicate too often and let the reader or viewer sort it out. My book is a memoir – no, it’s a history – no, it’s a guidebook. Many predicates can live alongside each other, but it helps to keep them delineated and discrete.
Two, it’s good for analyzing many other projects and keeping things on track. The predicate doesn’t lay out a map, it lays out a direction. This painting will be about animals and violence. This book will be about what makes home. Every other choice that you make – which sort of animal, is it real or imaginary, what kind of media – all of them stem from the predicate. In fact, they must serve the predicate. All of those questions that you might engage, about the nature of illusion, the nature of memory, the questioning of fact or history or reality, those are all secondary. The primary question must answer the predicate.
Another strength: you can look at any part of the whole at any scale and ask: does this have a predicate of its own? And does this serve the larger predicate?
Finally, I like the nonlinearity of "predicate." It can be deep, it can be overarching, but in no way is it necessarily first. It governs things through its mass, not through its priority.
I can say other things about the “predicate,” but my point here is that it replaces other near-synonyms that have unhelpful entailments or problematic baggage. I’m thinking of words like “story,” “narrative,” “purpose,” “mission,” “reason,” “point.” All of these things presuppose not only an audience but a local physics that ties them to a specific process or context. “Predicate” is suitably abstract. And if you can’t tell yet, I like things abstract.
“The point” is too reductive, sounds too slogany, too marketing. I dislike the impatience it implies. Also, the point is an arrival–it’s no good for describing a process. Which, on the other hand, can be governed by a predicate. Being in process is where we do most of our living and could actually use the guidance.
“Predicate” is also better than “narrative” and “story,” two overused terms, which assume the presence of a main character, change over time, and a conflict resolution. “Predicate” is better because it’s a posture to action but doesn’t require the typical trappings of the story, like a hero, nor the cliched lines of climaxes and fallings. Meanwhile, “argument” seems too pugilistic. It's too close to persuasion, though a rhetorical expert would understand that “argument” and “predicate” are largely the same thing. (Though if you have read your Kenneth Burke, you know that his "identification" and "predicate" are the same thing, and only subsequently can persuasion occur.)
Funnily enough, I came around to a very old notion from classical rhetorical theory, called the stases. These are the points on which a discussion often hangs up, or which may be fruitful for a richer discussion. The stases (in some schemes four, in some five) are:
1. does something exist?
2. if it exists, what is it?
3. once you’ve defined it, what is a good (or bad) instance of it?
4. where does that thing come from, and what does it cause in the world?
5. what should we do about that thing?
I realized that these predicates go from weaker to stronger. As I pointed out earlier, existence is such a weak predicate that it hardly counts. The prescriptive predicate is the strongest; it’s the territory of rules and tools.
I realize that these aren’t the only predicates, nor the only way to order them. But the predicate of this predicate concept is to serve as a tool; it has the strongest predicate, at least according to the scheme above.
