“The originary hypothesis repels the kind of initiatory revelatory ‘download’ that is nevertheless the only way of understanding it”
817 texts — GABlog, Substack, PDFs, book
I have been using “perfecting the imperative” as an idiom for technology for a while now and have started to pursue it further in some recent posts, in part by refining it through the concept of...
The question of speech or, to evoke post-structuralism, the sayable, is now to be pursued more thoroughly on the terrain of the expectant scene, credit and originary grammar. Obviously free speech...
I have worked with the notion of “idiom” rather than “theory” or “knowledge” because I want to defer the possibility of any metalanguage that is not convertible into the language it describes along...
Let’s start with a little utopian vision, one which I’m borrowing from someone who gave a talk at a GA conference some years back along those lines. He wanted to argue for the possibility of...
The last (Grammar of Technology) post suggests avenues of inquiry that would tie together on a higher level all the center study idioms I’ve been developing the last few years. First of all, it opens...
I’ve been stuck on my definition of technology (the primary one among others yet to be fully integrated) as the perfection of the imperative since I formulated it because, as I now realize, in part...
I’ve been reminded lately of Goodhart’s Law, that once the measure becomes a target it becomes useless as a measure. I can say that my incessant focus on the linguistification or semiotization of...
A few posts back I suggested “pointman” as a possible title for the occupant of the center (so I don’t have to keep writing “occupant of the center”) but in doing so I continued to overlook the fact...
A single sample includes the whole. This sentence is advocacy for a wild form of thinking, one involving abduction and an endless range of constantly re-examined (even self-re-examining) hypotheses....
I’ve been positing what would have to be seen as fairly radical “post-economics” theory in some recent posts and it seems like a good time to see if I can focus on it directly and in a sustained way...
I’m going to begin by doubling down on something I don’t recall mentioning for a while: the principle, or imperative, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” I won’t...
I’ve just read Gregory Lobo’s essay in the most recent Anthropoetics, “Homo imaginatus: Generative Anthropology, prefrontal synthesis and the origins of the human,” which includes a critique of the...
I have to admit I was a always a little tentative about the title of my book, even though it seemed to me appropriate and necessary. My thinking was that while anthropomorphizing was a very common...
This will be a short post. I think I have a simple way of addressing the issue of obedience and disobedience to the center more minimally than I have done so far. Both my recent incorporation of...
Carl Wennerlind, in his Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720, observes that the emergence of journalism in the wake of the political duopoly of Whigs and Tories resulted...
A central element of the “linguistic turn,” at least in its poststructuralist and postmodernist form, was the critique of “humanism,” taken to be the guiding ideology of the West in the post-WW 2 era...
The Axial Age can be defined as a new mode of rationality transcending ritual or a kind of secularization in which new modes of universal understanding transcend narrow or “compact” social groupings,...
Continuing to pursue the Holy Grail, or the white whale, whatever the case may be: a complete, self-generating, perfomative discourse on language drawn entirely out of the originary hypothesis and...
Secularism is a question regarding assessing the modern world but also one more specifically for the originary hypothesis which, you could say, brings secularization to its conclusion and thereby...
I’ll begin by doubling or, maybe, by this point, tripling or more down on couple of basic idioms or hypotheses. First, and most central, singularized succession in perpetuity—recently, in the course...
https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v12/katz.pdf https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v12/katz2.pdf Center Study Center is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and...
These videos are time capsules. But you might find Jacobus's book interesting.
Yes, there is something very performative (in the speech act theory sense) about what Trump is doing--pronouncement, personnel and policy are all sutured very closely together.
This will be an essay in method—the method of designing and mining idioms that serve as currency. As part of the case for Thirdness, I proposed establishing bets on curated judgments that are as...
“Donate your resentment to the center,” one of the first coined idioms of center studies, can now be given a more strictly economic meaning; i.e., it can be tokenized. “Resentment” remains an...
One of the most popular scientific axioms is that correlation is not causation, but if this is still true it soon will no longer be. If you have enough correlations (data collection) and the...
In the course of a recent exchange the discussion came to focus on whether the originary gesture of aborted appropriation could “scale up” all the way to global peace and cooperation, even if never...
Here I’ll attempt to synthesize a couple of fairly new concepts that I’ve so far introduced separately but must be made part of the idiom of Thirdness: the definition of the modern (only the modern?)...
There’s an important critique of Israel that I’ve seen circulating for a while and has been detailed in several books (which I haven’t yet read)—it’s a critique I think I would agree with but treat...
I have relied a lot on the architecture of the declarative sentence, including for the purpose of parsimoniously accounting for the history of media, broadly from orality to literacy to whatever we...